Untitled

The two untitled works by Zbigniew Rogalski in Collection II were created during the artist’s student days at the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznań. His explorations at the time were directed towards the core of the field he was exploring, namely, painting. Rogalski originated from the geometric abstraction school of Jerzy Kałucki, in whose studio he studied. Looking at his early works, as well as his later oeuvre, it is hard not to conclude that he followed a different path; that of exploring colour, the properties of paint, the power of the painterly gesture, and finally autotelic reflections on the nature of painting. Nevertheless, it seems that many of his principles: the precision of expression, the aspiration to build synthetic forms, and the sensitivity to the meanings conveyed by the image he creates, he had gained from Kałucki’s teachings.

The protagonist of both canvases is colour, the immanent building block of the painterly universe. Rogalski looks at it from two perspectives: the material – the paint which carries the colour – and the potential to influence the viewer. The works were inspired by colour charts available in professional art shops, as well as tables with rows of letters or numbers used by ophthalmologists to assess visual acuity. The smaller of the paintings is characterised by its rich texture. Rogalski paints with a sweeping gesture, applying paint in thick layers, leaving clear traces of dabs and strokes. Loose hairs of the brush can be discerned on the surface, and in places, the weave of the canvas shows through. Rogalski does not hide these imperfections, and the vibrant texture yields to the light. The colour red, whose name is written in various languages: ROUGE, ROJO, ROSSO, RED, reveals its ambiguity.

Helped by the pattern books and the proper names of colour shades, Rogalski emphatically demonstrates that a generalised “red” is a fiction. There is no single red colour, and the painter has many nuances of it at his disposal. Even in his early works, Rogalski showed himself greatly suspicious of his own technique. This attitude of suspicion stayed with him, especially in works that engage in a discussion with realism and the apparent obviousness in seeing the world. By exploring the workshop of his métier, Rogalski reveals to the viewer a unique painterly reality, whose main driving force is the imperative to create; the need to paint.

Izabela Kopania
translated from Polish by Klaudyna Michałowicz